JARON LANIER
Where to start? In short, Jaron is a computer scientist, composer, visual artist, and author. Although Lanier may be best known for his work in computer science, he has also been very active in the world of “new classical” music since the late seventies. He is a pianist and a specialist in unusual musical instruments, especially the wind and string instruments of Asia. He maintains one of the largest and most varied collections of actively played rare instruments in the world. Lanier has performed with artists as diverse as Philip Glass, Ornette Coleman, George Clinton, Sean Lennon, Vernon Reid, Terry Riley, Duncan Sheik, Pauline Oliveros, and Stanley Jordan. Recording projects include his acoustic techno duet with Sean Lennon and an album of duets with flautist Robert Dick.
Jaron released a critically acclaimed new classical album Instruments of Change in 1994 on POINT Music/Philips/PolyGram Records. Stephen Hill described the album as a Western exploration of Asian musical traditions by Stephen Hill on Hearts of Space.
Lanier’s work with Asian instruments can be heard extensively on the soundtrack he co-composed with Mario Grigorov, The Third Wave: A Volunteer Story, presented by Sean Penn and executive produced by Morgan Spurlock and Joe Amodei. The film screened at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival during the Presidential Jury Screening and was released theatrically in September 2009 to critical acclaim after winning awards at film festivals in over 20 countries around the world. Lanier’s work with acoustic “world” instruments can also be heard on Three Seasons (1999), which was the first film ever to win both the Audience and Grand Jury awards at the Sundance Film Festival.
Lanier has also pioneered the use of Virtual Reality in musical stage performance with his band Chromatophoria, which has toured around the world as a headline act in venues such as the Montreux Jazz Festival. He plays virtual instruments and uses real instruments to guide events in virtual worlds. Jaron also writes chamber and orchestral music. The work he has been commissioned to write have been performed around the world.
MARK DEUTSCH
Mark Deutsch can best be described as a 21st century Renaissance man. A professional musician since the age of twelve, he is a visionary artist with a background in non-linear mathematics, sacred systems and cosmology. As a classically trained bassist and sitar player he has gained extensive experience in orchestral ensembles, world music traditions, jazz combos, and solo sitar performance. While studying sitar and North Indian classical music with the legendary Ustad Imrat Khan, Mark began delving deeper into the universal fundamentals of music and their underlying frequency structures. These studies culminated in 1999 with Mark being awarded the US patent for his ground breaking new instrument the Bazantar – a five-string acoustic bass fitted with an additional twenty-nine sympathetic strings and four drone strings. The result is a remarkable instrument that weaves a mesmerizing soundscape of resonance, and evokes all the power of Western classical music with the depth and nuance of Eastern traditions.
Since the creation of the Bazantar, and the critically acclaimed release of his first solo album “Fool”, Mark has been performing extensively world wide. His awe-inspiring solo sitar and Bazantar performances have drawn rave reviews from the international music community and have generated invitations for Mark to perform at the Juilliard School of Music, Merkan Concert Hall, Earthdance International, The Hawaiian Contrabass Festival and many other high profile venues. Mark recently completed the theatre score for a much lauded French production of Steven Berkoff’s adaptation of Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher”. On the collaborative side, his music has attracted an eclectic array of some of today’s finest musicians, including Grammy award-winning cellist David Darling, film composer David Julyan (Insomnia, Memento), seminal Chicago rock band Tortoise, virtuoso erhu player and principle soloist with the Beijing National Symphony Yang Ying, and jazz luminaries such as William Parker, Roy Campbell, and Hamid Drake.
Mark currently resides in San Francisco and continues to work with some of the most respected musicians, scientists and sonic adventurers who are looking to him as a revolutionary guide to these newfound realms of vibration and sound.